Dayanak

What Dayanak MCP server does

Dayanak MCP server supports legal research in Turkish court decisions and legislation. Its sources include Bedesten/Yargıtay, the Constitutional Court, the Council of State, the Jurisdictional Disputes Court, the Competition Authority, the Court of Accounts, the Revenue Administration, mevzuat.gov.tr, the Official Gazette, and the Personal Data Protection Authority through source adapters.

The server can work against live sources or a local corpus. The documented local dataset contains 11,108,242 decisions and 14,298 legislation records, including current versions and article-level records. The corpus is stored in SQLite and supports FTS5 full-text queries. Semantic search uses FAISS indexes and multilingual-e5-small embeddings. These figures are identified as measurements from 16 September 2026, so they should be treated as a dated corpus snapshot rather than a permanent count.

How it works

A quick installation can run without downloading the large local corpus. In that mode, decision and legislation searches use live sources, and decision full text can also be retrieved live. Tools that depend only on the local corpus return no local result and direct the request toward live tools when appropriate.

With the corpus installed, local decision search combines full-text and semantic retrieval. Local legislation search works at the article level. The server caches retrieved material in ~/.dayanak/cache.sqlite3 by default, or at the location selected with DAYANAK_CACHE_PATH.

Citation safety is part of the tool behavior. The project states that it does not fabricate decisions, metadata, dates, docket numbers, chambers, citations, or statutory articles. Documents lacking full_text or html_markdown are not suitable for quoting or drafting, and quoteUsable and draftUsable are true only when the required full text or HTML Markdown exists.

Setup and configuration

Python 3.11 or newer is required. The quick path uses uvx --from dayanak dayanak-server, while pipx install dayanak provides a persistent installation. The server can run over stdio, which is the default, or streamable HTTP. HTTP uses the /mcp endpoint and can be configured with DAYANAK_MCP_HOST and DAYANAK_MCP_PORT.

DAYANAK_TOOL_PROFILE selects the default core profile or the full profile. Core registers 11 tools; extended categories are added at runtime through load_extended_tools. Local semantic search may additionally require faiss-cpu, along with the embedding dependencies used by the installation.

Tools and capabilities

Core tools cover live decision search, document retrieval, local decision search, live and local legislation search, legislation retrieval, topic research, exports, dynamic tool loading, and health checks. Extended groups add citation checking, petition preparation, legal-file reading, source and guide discovery, source health checks, watches, privacy scanning and redaction, chamber analysis, index status, advanced drafting, and UDF/PDF administration.

The CLI is also available for source listing, live searches, document retrieval, semantic-index status, local legislation queries, and offline smoke tests. Separate scripts support incremental crawling and a local status panel, but these are operational features rather than MCP tools.

Limitations and notes

The local corpus is large, and the README describes a 72 GB SQLite snapshot. Live-source behavior depends on the availability of the public services and their adapters. Rate limiting is intentionally designed for one user on one computer, not for high-concurrency use.

The former package name was emsal-mcp; that package now installs dayanak, while legacy EMSAL_* variables and the ~/.emsal_mcp data directory remain readable. The documentation does not identify a software license in the supplied material.